Hollywood actor, director Dennis Hopper dies at 74

Sunday

May 30, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 30, 2010 at 11:25 AM

Dennis Hopper, 74, an actor and director whose low-budget biker movie Easy Rider made an unexpected fortune by exploring the late 1960s counterculture, and who changed Hollywood by helping open doors to younger directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, died yesterday at home in Venice, Calif.

Dennis Hopper, 74, an actor and director whose low-budget biker movie Easy Rider made an unexpected fortune by exploring the late 1960s counterculture, and who changed Hollywood by helping open doors to younger directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, died yesterday at home in Venice, Calif.

Hopper, who enjoyed a career resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s playing alcoholics and compelling psychopaths in films including Hoosiers, Blue Velvet and Speed, learned last year that he had cancer.

Easy Rider, released in 1969, was often called a generational marker. As the director, co-star and co-screenwriter, Hopper called the film his “state of the union message” about a country on the brink of self-destruction because of the Vietnam War, intolerance and greed. He, actor Peter Fonda and writer Terry Southern shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

Independently financed, Easy Rider cost less than $500,000 to make and grossed tens of millions of dollars. This windfall astonished executives at many Hollywood studios, which were losing lots of money after years of making flops such as Dr. Dolittle.

The economic success of Easy Rider “signaled a sea change in Hollywood, causing studio chiefs to embrace the new ‘youth audience’ and offer employment to other young, even untried, filmmakers,” said film critic and historian Leonard Maltin.

Easy Rider was credited with helping to usher in the 1970s rise of younger directors including Spielberg, Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.

Hopper was a first-time director when he made Easy Rider. He had started his movie career with promise, appearing opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). But his reputation for substance abuse and angering veteran directors had caused acting offers to dry up. On the set of True Grit (1969), Hopper so angered John Wayne that the star reportedly chased him with a loaded gun.

After the overwhelming success of Easy Rider, Hopper’s next film, The Last Movie (1971), was a $1 million box-office flop.

He retreated to a commune in New Mexico, where he binged on rum, tequila and cocaine and fell into a fit of paranoia. He took a handful of acting jobs, but his career was otherwise stalled. In 1984, he was committed to a psychiatric ward. Hopper described this as the lowest point in his life.

He finally got clean and decided to channel his “compulsive” personality into work. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role as an alcoholic coach in the basketball drama Hoosiers (1986) and directed the police drama Colors (1988) starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.

Mostly, Hopper specialized in weirdly intense characters, which prompted film critic Roger Ebert to call him the “most dependable and certainly the creepiest villain in the movies.”